Academia

Personal Plug: The Victorians, Darwin & Lit Crit

by

The first review of my husband’s book, Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics is out. He’s published a lot on Matthew Arnold, Victorian autobiographies, the Czechs, but this is his first full-length critical work using Darwinian criticism. This isn’t exactly a literary blog, but Tod Williams (who, in good peer review fashion we don’t know, but appers friendly to this methodology) reminds me of the way literature used to be approached.

My husband was attracted to this method: he argues it was growing up on a farm and reading Tennyson in the truck on the way to the feed store that made it natural. On another plane, of course, as the reviewer notes: “It should come as no surprise that an established Matthew Arnold scholar would approach literature with a concern for universal human truths or that one with such interests would turn to literary Darwinism for a methodology.” He examines that popular (but now seldom read) Victorian genre – the “long poem.” “Machann maintains in his introduction that the issue of masculinity is not only central to the four long poems he treats but to ‘our understanding of Victorian literature: its major themes, its idealism and social criticism, its perplexities and uncertainties’” (1) The Victorians restrained masculine violence in many ways, but the ideal of chivalry and “manliness” was also expressed in adventuring (both geographically and intellectually).

Read more

Self-Esteem vs Self-Respect

by

An interesting essay by Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychologist who has worked extensively in prisons. Via psychiatrist Dr Sanity, who adds thoughts of her own.

My sense is that the self-esteem movement started benignly enough, with the sensible idea that it is usually better to focus on praising people for things they do right rather than on condemning them for their inadequacies. But it soon fell into the hands of various airheads, many of them professors in “education” schools, who too frequently have been hostile to the whole notion of individual achievement and individual accountability.

Read more

Happy Warriors & Not-so-Happy Ones

by

Long before I returned to my conservative roots, I loved the humor of a Buckley – the right seemed to have more fun with ideas. Great satire points out the foibles of the disproportionate. Jane Austen understood that. It is the sharp recognition of a truth about human nature that makes us smile, albeit ruefully. Even with the rather meager set of social values Seinfeld embodied, his friends, in their superficiality and greed and general laziness, made us laugh. We laughed because they didn’t recognize what we owe to others, what living with others requires of us say, not sleeping under the desk or sharing bathroom tissue. The writer’s sense of the variety & density of our cultural restraints and our own impulses permeated that series.

We enjoyed Seinfeld and his friends because they loved words but also because we took a certain pleasure in their violation of good manners that restrained us: we wouldn’t make their choices, but we would be tempted. We restrained those impulses (or hid them) because we understood they violated not just gentility but morality. The last episode made that clear to us: in the real world, we would have felt contempt (or guilt) – but watching them, we could laugh. That wasn’t a funny episode; it was an arresting conclusion.

Read more

Images, Analogies, and Cooties

by

In a comment, Mishu linked to “The Lie of a Liberal Arts Education.” Jeff Goldstein, of Protein Wisdom, tells us after a political cartoon was posted at his site, an old teacher e-mailed him, requesting that his name be struck from the list of Goldstein’s teachers. That we are responsible for those who have studied under us would make neither my raft of old teachers very happy nor me about many of my students. (Jonathan’s need to fix my comma splices, for instance, must make one of them spin in his grave.)

I’d seen the comment (for the usual reason, groggy in the morning and late at night, I check out Instapundit). And I’d remembered it clearly, since it brought home the adolescent and enforced homogeneity of academic thinking but also because the cartoon was especially memorable, disturbing the way political cartoons can be. The visual and analogous are powerful weapons. The Muslims realize that – and we should, too. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we follow the actions of either the Jihadists or the average college faculty. When I went back later to show it to my husband, the cartoon was linked but no longer at the top of the page. It provokes, but it has a certain rightness. I found it and my husband was repelled. He felt it was in bad taste. His explanation for that gut reaction was not a defense of Obama nor of the content or the process of Healthcare legislation as would any sentient being, he sees those as pretty bad. Nor did he see it as racist indeed, worrying about that label would make any criticism difficult.

Read more